Companies Focus on Customers When Harnessing 'Big Data'

Companies are using a variety of analytic tools

Dealing with “Big Data” is a challenge for many marketers, but its rise in importance is pushing more and more to use it. According to research from IBM and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, the main objective for companies worldwide is to use the data to achieve customer-centric outcomes.

Nearly half of IT and business professionals reported that as their primary goal for Big Data this year. That was more than twice the number who cited operational optimization, with other objectives even farther behind.

Respondents were collecting and analyzing data from many sources to meet this objective. Nearly nine in 10 said they were using transactional data, and three-quarters were collecting log data. Information about events and from emails were also analyzed by more than half of respondents, and 43% were using social data, the survey found.

The research also suggested companies had numerous tools at their disposal to turn Big Data from masses of information into something actionable.

But many marketers report still having trouble on this front. A quarter of executives worldwide told the Economist Intelligence Unit in July that difficulty mining Big Data for customer insights was preventing them from delivering more value to their businesses. And in September, nearly two-thirds of US marketers surveyed indicated to the Winterberry Group and the Interactive Advertising Bureau that finding a way to manage Big Data was a factor driving them toward data management platforms as a solution to their marketing problems.